In Fact

'Prospect magazine is the sharpest, wittiest and increasingly the most important journal of opinion in Britain'

Social Standing
* One in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator.
* By law, every child in Belgium must take harmonica lessons.
* Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins.
* 5.8 per cent of people ever born are alive today.
* Each successive monarch faces in a different direction on British coins.
* When India's Sachin Tendulkar bats against Pakistan in test matches, the television audience in India exceeds the total population of Europe.
* Queen Victoria spoke Urdu and Hindi.
* The word "boredom" did not exist in the English language until after 1750.
* Peanuts are used as an ingredient in dynamite.
* Of all heart attacks, around 6 per cent occur during sexual intercourse. Of these, 90 per cent happen during extramarital sex. * In 1949, there were 160,000 young Conservatives; today, there are 3,000.

Think again.
* A third of the world's obese people live in developing countries.
* Hitler was on the shortlist for the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize.
* In 2002 the Amazon rainforest still covered 87 per cent of its 1950s footprint.
* Only ten of 55 Democratic senators voted to empower President Bush to use the US army in the first Gulf war in 1991. Had three or more followed the party line and voted against, Bush would have lost the Senate vote.
* At 365 square kilometres, the Gaza strip is slightly smaller than Sheffield.
* In the 1930s, the Inland Revenue investigated Yeats's tax returns because they could not believe a poet of his stature had sales that were so small.
* In 1998 of 106 daily newspapers in Canada, Conrad Black owned 62.
* Per capita, the biggest arms exporter in the world is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Sweden is second, Jordan third and Norway fourth.
* By the age of five, children have acquired 85 per cent of the language they will have as adults.

And as they are all credited, you know whom to blame.